living without alcohol, living again

Main menu

Post navigation

To be heard

Today was the ‘free your voice’ class. I ended up crying during one of the exercises. No, not sobbing and loosing it, just eyes leaking. I am fine with that, guessing the group was as well. It is very intense after all. It is a very safe group too anyhow.

The group teams up in teams of 2 and 1 sings to the other while the teacher plays the piano as background music. This is not a singing lesson so there is no song to sing, there are no lines, no melodies, nothing, the singer just sings, chants, whatever comes. The idea is to stay with the note(s) that is/are there and let come what wants to come out. Yes, vague, vague, give it a try if you have objections about the actual use of it – you will see. :-D.

The excercise starts while the singer has the eyes closed. After a while, when the singer has found her (yes, all hers) singing legs she opens her eyes. I tried to open my eyes. I could not. And I cried. About being heard. The excercise was that the other person would listen and she listened so beautifully and vulnerably that I just sang and cried. I could feel her be with me and listening without expecting support me in my singing. So I sang.

And… I realised that I don’t trust people to listen. From there on I speak out loudly, a lot of times just put my opinion out there, not taking others into consideration since ‘they don’t listen anyhow and if they could they don’t hear, if they hear they don’t comprehend.’ Sorry, 10.000 times sorry. This is how it is. I wish it was not. I am guessing growing up with a father who has Aspergers and a mother who is always tired because she is ill results in the feeling of not being heard and understood. Add to that a lack of social skills and there you are. 😦

In real life I think I tend to hide in plain sight. So many people think I am very strong and self-confident because to them I seem to act like that. By now I think it is because I sort of block them out because I imagine that they do not hear me and do not care.

I feel that the openness of my blog has to do with this too. Even the likes and the beautiful comments and the 200 hits per day of the last weeks, even with I still don’t believe people actually hear me. I feel unheard. With that I do not mean that I want to have the intention not to speak with you or hear you either, it is ‘just’ that being heard is not a concept to me. Being heard is something that happens at the therapist and even then: from where it is, most of the time things need changing and it cannot be or stay.

I realise now that I did not listen to me either. Drinking had a lot to do with covering up my internal voice and on top of that stilling the pain that I got from that. This blog is an exercise in learning to listen. I see that now. Feeling my way back into life in a different way every day but it is happening. Again and again. 🙂

During the evening I became more comfortable less uncomfortable with my new found notion and let myself go with the flow, be carried by the others more than to dissociate myself within my own thoughts and fears. Trust. NEW. Like. 🙂

We finished with singing a simple line together and I suddenly had it in me to make up second voices. I remembered that’s how my dad and I used to sing together during doing the dishes or evening walks. He would sing or whistle a song and I would make up second voices and then we’ld trail off and make our own song. Times were good then.

So I’m getting there, even if it is not singing normally with the crowd but with making up second voices. Well, it is where I was today and I learned a lot.

Happy that I quite because I would not have had this experience and insight. 🙂